It’s Miller Tyme

Last year, Miller Lite released cans with a throwback design, in conjunction with “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues,” a nominal movie that served mostly as a marketing peg for everything from ice cream to underwear. The sixteen-ounce tallboys harked back to the company’s branding from the early seventies, with the word “Lite” appearing above a logo touting “a fine pilsner beer,” set against a white background. It was supposed to be a limited-time offering, but, as the company saw sales rise on the strength of the new-old cans, the time limit kept extending. Now, MillerCoors, the beer’s domestic distributor, has announced that it’s switching back to the old branding full-time. This, it seems, is your dad’s Miller Lite.

As far as nostalgia trips go, however, a journey back to the year 1973 may not seem especially alluring. Wide ties, ugly cars, “Crocodile Rock”? But, for members of Miller Lite’s key demographic, men between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-nine, who were spared living through those years, the specifics of the era may be less important than more general notions of the past. “Since millennial beer drinkers are into authenticity and heritage, and with Miller Lite being the original light beer, we believe this is causing a lot of interest,” Jonathan Stern, the director of media relations for MillerCoors, told the Milwaukee Business Journal, in March.

The words “authenticity” and “heritage” are marketing shorthand for what appeals to a particular kind of millennial consumer—one belonging to the amorphous and ever-expanding category of “hipster.” When the terms are applied to beer, they point directly toward Pabst Blue Ribbon. Pabst has seen its sales increase each year since 2003, almost entirely due to its popularity among young drinkers, and despite not spending much on marketing. Pabst’s brand identity lives squarely on its can, which emphasizes, no surprise, the beer’s authenticity and heritage. At the bottom, in cursive script, it details the beer’s original recipe; at the top, also in cursive, are the words “Established in Milwaukee in 1844.” The iconography is simple and clear, with none of the slick variations on chrome favored by its cheap-beer competitors: it doesn’t look like Bud Light or Coors Light. It looks, in fact, like the old Miller Lite can.

When it comes to American beer, however, authenticity and heritage are slippery terms. Pabst may have been born in Milwaukee, in 1844, but it is no longer the unaffected brand that had won Frank Booth’s heart in "Blue Velvet." Its headquarters are now in Los Angeles, and it doesn’t even brew the beer it sells. That messy business is handled by none other than MillerCoors, a joint venture of the two multinational beverage behemoths SABMiller and Molson Coors Brewing Company.

As for Miller Lite, its own brand heritage would seem to be a harder sell for the hipster set. Its very existence represents a modern compromise between a desire to drink and anxiety about getting fat. Even the name, Lite, is a contemporary addition to the language, suggesting not only that something has fewer calories but that it may also be, as Webster’s has it, “diminished or lacking in substance or seriousness.” Indeed, the story of Miller Lite has always been a story about marketing. For nearly twenty years, beginning with its creation, in 1973, Miller used the same national advertising campaign, which earned a place in industry lore and became, along the way, a cultural touchstone. The spots centered on the phrase “Tastes Great, Less Filling,” and featured aging, voluble former athletes and assorted tough guys getting together to debate the competing merits of the beer. In 1976, for example, the Boston Celtics coach Tommy Heinsohn argued the question with the referee Mendy Rudolph, before getting himself thrown out of the bar. The ads reached peak meathead a couple of years later, when a large cast of spokesmen was assembled for a game of tug-of-war on the beach, with the Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto calling the action:

This is the heritage of Miller Lite: a time capsule for a specific moment in American consumer culture, filled with celebrities already edging past their expiration dates. When the two swimsuit models arrive, that’s the crime writer Mickey Spillane leading the chase, greeting them with the words “Hi, dolls!” The final slogan seems more like a resigned commentary on American stagnation and mediocrity than a consumer enticement: “Everything you ever wanted in a beer. And less.”

Miller Lite’s move back to the old can may be more about the company’s own nostalgia than that of its customers. The seventies and eighties were the glory days for Miller Lite (if not for taste or gender equality in beer advertising). Miller Lite was then the best-selling light beer in America. By the early nineties, though, it was losing market share to Bud Light and Coors Light, and many people blamed its stalwart ad campaign. As an analyst told the Times in 1991, “Lite got very gray and tired and paunchy.” He was referring to the brand, but he could have been talking specifically about its pitchmen. If it were going to stay atop the light-beer heap, Miller would need to appeal to young people.

It has been trying ever since. In the years following “Tastes Great, Less Filling,” Miller Lite burned through several ad agencies and campaigns. A look through the business-news archives finds a recurring theme: Miller Lite, losing ground to competitors, looking to get its mojo back. Every few years, it would try a variation on the old taste/filling debate. In 2001, it changed its label design, introducing a blue and silver scheme that made it look similar, if largely indistinguishable, from its rival Bud Light, which by this point had long ago taken over the light-beer category. In 2003, it paid for a controversial, crassly misogynistic ad featuring two beautiful women locked in an escalating “catfight” over the eternal Miller Lite question.

Now, facing further erosion in its market share—the major corporate producers are all being squeezed by smaller brewers and other alcohol choices—Miller has scrapped more than twenty years of brand maneuvering and color-scheme tweaks and updates, hoping to restart the clock at a moment before Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency.

Of course, it may be a lot simpler than all this: that the older design is just manifestly better than the new one, and Miller was wise to recognize that fact rather than to lurch toward another ill-considered reinvention. In a sense, the stars may have simply aligned, and the desires of its core audience came to coincide with the best version of Miller Lite’s own story. Just as Pabst might evoke some fairy-tale notion of blue-collar, union-strong Milwaukee, so, too, does the old Miller Lite can suggest a nebulous idea about the American past—one generic enough to let young people fill in the gaps themselves. It seems like the kind of can that a protagonist in a Springsteen song would crush under his boot. (Or so it seemed to me: I reached for a six-pack of the old-style cans recently, and felt some mythic classic-rock, classic-car stirrings as I cracked one open. If young beer drinkers are collectively not exactly suckers, they are at least highly and sadly suggestible.)

It’s not clear, however, that the old branding will continue to bring in new customers. Businessweek notes that, for the year that ended on August 12th, Miller Lite’s sales were down a per cent from the same period a year before, despite the mild bump from the retro design in the middle of that span. If this latest gambit fails, Miller may have to go to still greater lengths to tap into young men’s desire for heritage, to evoke a can that never quite existed. Call it Ye Olde Miller Lyghte. The kids will love it.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.